Concluding Remarks

We have surveyed several key components required for evaluating the quality of compressed images: the compression itself; three data sets to be considered in depth in subsequent chapters; quantitative measures of quality involving measures of pixel intensity distortion, observer-judged subjective distortion, and diagnostic accuracy; and, lastly, several notions of

"gold standard'' with respect to which quality can be compared. In the next chapter these ideas provide a context and a collection of tools for a detailed analysis of three specific medical image modalities and tasks.